


Those Little Lights

by orionandthestars



Category: Runaways (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-09
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-05-04 11:24:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14591985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orionandthestars/pseuds/orionandthestars
Summary: The best part of running away, Gert decided, was the fact that if she squinted hard enough against the darkening night sky, she could make out the faint twinkling of the stars above.The first night on the run.





	Those Little Lights

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Dean Lewis's "Let Go" - give it a listen while you read.

The best part of running away, Gert decided, was the fact that if she squinted hard enough against the darkening night sky, she could make out the faint twinkling of the stars above.

Their temporary home - for the night, she believed, but it could be for much longer - might be a stolen van from a cult-like church, but they had somehow navigated it up a series of winding mountain roads to the campsite they’d initially found earlier that day. Between the rising curls of smoke from the fire pit Molly and Chase had so deftly assembled and the mélange of sleeping bags, blankets, and random articles of clothing piled in the van’s interior, it almost felt like childhood adventure. Another weekend of exploring and camping and friendship, just like old times. (Gert would have to squint again to ignore the glaring absence that was their usual childhood ringleader, and clench her jaw a little to try to quash the growing panic swirling in her stomach, but the analogy almost worked. Almost.)

She bit her lip softly, trying to steady her breathing by focusing on the lights of Brentwood below. _“How long do you think it would take to walk home?”_  She had overheard Alex badger Nico earlier, and knew better than to imply in the slightest that they should go home (did they even _**have**_  a home to go back to?) but Gert couldn’t shake the laughable irony of running away to somehow gain an even clearer view of the world they had once known, the world that had been crumbling beneath their feet for weeks. It was quite a brilliant idea - Nico’s, she thinks - hiding in the recreational preserve nestled behind the Palisades. The area was traditionally the (is the hallowed) hiking ground of bored Los Angeles housewives and a select cadre of Instagram models - two  that would, like clockwork, stick to the wide trails and vistas of the rolling hills and pose little threat of stumbling through the underbrush upon six now-ragged looking teenagers who seemed to exude “on the run” from their tired bones and weary eyes. The thicket of trees towering over them for shade and some protection from the elements, while the small clearing ahead gave them enough room to scavenge for supplies and, more importantly, not feel suffocated by one another.

Hiding in plain sight was clearly not meant to be their final destination - no, it was a temporary plug to the deluge of problems and issues and logistics that they desperately needed to discuss, analyze, and solve, but in the same way you’d feel a brief of flicker of relief when a hastily-applied band-aid stops the bleeding of a paper cut so you can continue on and assess the wound in better light, their makeshift campsite was like a quick breath filling lungs with air again, steadying the body for a moment in turn. It was a baby step in the seemingly endless marathon that lay ahead: they just needed to survive the night. They could survive tonight. And then they would find a new place to stash their supplies and camp out. And survive that night. And again.

Rinse.

Repeat.

Gert could feel the need for more permanent accommodations, for some sense of stability, as if it were lodged at the bottom of her throat. How long could they really live as nomads, constantly in transit and increasingly further from every comfort they had known in the lives they’d taken for granted. How could they find a place to fit all six of them? A place they could afford when all they had were handfuls of crumpled bills that had been hastily shoved in wallets days before. Would they be safe there? The evil didn’t erase the fact that their parents - her parents - were some of the most brilliant minds in the world: it wouldn’t be long until the kids were found, and, she assumed, an actual battle would commence. The parents had arrived with Jonah last night, stood by silently as he took aim at the lot of them, and Gert couldn’t bring herself to fathom what the next version of the conflict would look like, or whether they would all make it out unscathed as they - impossibly - had this time.

But now was not the time for plans, she reminded herself, steeling her gaze on the white flickers above the horizon line, fingernails digging into palms as a last-ditch effort to prevent her mind from spiraling with what ifs. The sun had set quite a while ago, the last few embers of their makeshift campsite quietly smoldering into ash. She could still smell the remains of the Whole Foods soup they’d attempted to reheat over the flames (to questionable results). Molly, in her newly ravenous post-strength state, tried to inhale half of it before Nico threw one of Dale’s bran bars at the curly-haired girl, reminding her that five others had to be sustained, too. The night air had cooled in the darkness, bringing in the Los Angeles kind of evening that was chilly enough to coax out the goosebumps on her skin but largely a comfortable warmth. And with it, the energy had slowly ebbed out of the teens, each desperately craving the moments of stillness and quiet to rest, unwind tense muscles, and gently close their eyes.

The five had come to a silent agreement as the night began to fade in: a ceasefire, for the night, on the mechanics of what they were actually doing - no arguments about their next move, no inklings of plans or contingencies. Not until they could regain some of their strength and tenacity. (Alex, their new self-proclaimed ringleader and lucky number six, had disappeared shortly after they parked the van in the wooded hills. Gert was sure he had embarked on some errand to find them food, money, or wifi; the others, not so much).

The longer she sat around the dwindling fire, surrounded by so many thoughts unsaid and so many fears unannounced, the more she could feel her anxiety pulsing through her veins, slowly inflating each blood vessel until she was constricting from the inside out. Was the air getting thicker, the smoke suddenly blowing against the wind, or was it just her? She thinks she managed to steady her voice for long enough to tell the others she was going for a walk - only Molly shooting her the glance that should have been reserved for a concerned older sister - palms sweaty and cheeks red, but from more than the fire in front of her.

The worn-smooth grey rock had succeeded in grounding her, physically and emotionally. She was only a few meters out from the campsite - perched near one of the hill’s edges - and if she turned her head just slightly to the left, she could see four shadows illuminated in orange out of the corner of her eye, and the very fact that they were there - alive, whole, _there_  - was enough to flush a fraction of the tensions out of her shoulders.

Gert tugged her arms more tightly around her chest, grateful, surprisingly, to have driven her beat-up station wagon to the dance last night. It was far from a coach fit for Cinderella - no, even joining the Lyft armada would have been a step up from the peeling red paint and the cracked leather seats - but the sheer amount of storage space had fit both a dinosaur and a random assortment of last minute supplies her anxiety decided she should assemble. And sure, driving to the dig site resulted in a short-circuiting electrical frame and the lingering sadness that her car, which she had helped Dale restore with her own two hands and had dutifully loved since, was little more than a heap of metal scraps, but it also meant that she could snag her well-worn denim jacket before they ducked past the Gibborim guard, giving her some semblance of warmth over the flimsy dress she’d worn to the dance.

Even now, the long sleeves of the black floral wrap poked out under the jacket’s perfectly oversized cuffs.

It had been sweltering all day, which she should have expected, but even she couldn’t have expected that when she locked the front door behind her on the way to the dance it would be a more permanent closure of the door. Gert had desperately wanted to shimmy out of a layer, to free her arms and skin from the oppressive California heat, but every time she considered it the wind would flutter chiffon against her legs and she’d feel the ghosts of warm fingertips drawing down her arms, up the side of her thighs, the edge of her neck, palms spreading over the expanse of her back.

Fingernails dug into her palms again.

To slide out of the jacket would be to stand once again in the dress that Gert, support your sisters and dismantle the patriarchy Gert, had worn to make a boy notice her. Molly, too smart for her own good, had called her out on it with a laugh, and Gert was forced to confront the fact that she didn’t live her truth. She tried, she thinks; she did, momentarily: she was honest, afraid but persevering, intent on making what she wanted happen.

And then it did, but between the conversation they didn’t get to have after being unceremoniously caught by Nico and Karolina and the drive drenched in awkward silence where it seemed everyone except Alex had known something happened (and oh how it happened), Gert’s anxiety crept up bit by bit, until it she swore that her hands on the steering wheel were the only things keeping her from passing out right then and there. And then he grabbed her hand as the split up to beat the clock, and she could feel her lungs constricting as she watched him so focused on shutting down the system and the mission at hand when all she could think about was his lips on hers, and the blooming mark at the edge of where her neck meets her shoulder, and the way he whispered her name like a prayer as he cradled her face in his hands, and the little noise of the anxiety in the back of her head that was telling her it was a fluke, it had to be.

She couldn’t even derive satisfaction or peace of mind from a replay. Gert remembers the first few movements - slamming the car door behind her, willing her nervous footsteps in slightly higher-than-normal heeled boots to not collapse beneath her, the subtle change in his face as he spots her from across the room. And then they’re talking, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world: no two years of silence, no crazy and possibly evil parents, no stood-up coffee dates. She cringes, even now, as she remembers rehashing one of her most embarrassing moments, knowing that in her haste to change the subject she never really registered his reaction.

And that’s when it really starts: the shifts in and out of focus that last for the whole twenty minutes of what happened. She can remember some of her words, how her heart threatened to burst out of her throat as she asked him to the dance, the way her hand tugs on his away from what their - his - life used to be. She can still feel the fear bubbling up inside her, forcing her gaze away from his before he can see how much she cares, how much she wants this, and how solid he feels under her head as they slow dance.

But the rest blurs. She wished she’d willed herself to commit more of the night to memory: to catalog the cadence of his voice as he told her he’d always seen her, to imprint the look in his eyes in the back of her mind, to register something that would give her more clarity now.

She tried to discern which Chase Stein had been in front of her, bare skin on top of hers, and which stood in front of her now. Was it Chase Stein, the lacrosse player? The Adonis incarnate roaming the halls of Atlas, team captain, Eiffel’s arm candy with a laundry list of rumored conquests, too cool to have ever seen her. Or was it Chase Stein, the childhood best friend with a small gap in the front of his toothy smile? The boy with hair that stood up on end, mussed nearly to death by afternoons rolling around in backyard and running flustered through trees, who once tried to win a bet that he could make an impenetrable Gert blush, by kissing her on the lips. Her first.

Tiny half-moon indents across her palms.

So she sat, attempting to slow her racing pulse by turning her face skyward, counting the stars, tracing the constellations with her eyes, each figure arising from familiar grooves between stars. It was calming, searching for - and then successfully finding - the shapes and images she knew so well, the ones etched on her bedroom ceiling via glow-in-dark stickers and decorating her laptop’s home screen. Every night, without fail, they would be there - only a degree or two off from where they had been the night before, and that knowledge was like a security blanket around her shoulders.

Gert had inherited her love of stargazing from her mother, just as she had a fierce determination built for someone twice her size and a tongue even sharper than her mind. It was something the two of them had done for as long as she could remember, clamoring onto the roof from the attic’s spiral stairs, laying back against an unzipped sleeping bag, and looking into the past. She was unsure if Stacey had introduced her to astronomy to soothe the responsibility she felt for passing a lineage of anxiety and depression to her biological daughter - for as much as she loved Molly, Gert was her own flesh and blood, for better or for worse - but she had been right to share this at an age when Gert was still young enough and naive enough and trusting enough to let her mother in and listen.

And so they stargazed.

Gert remembers the first time her parents took her on one of their research trips - trains and boats and planes to a far away place deep in the jungle - and how she cried at the thought of missing her friends. She was young then, maybe six or seven, and the thought of not being able to run down the street to Chase’s or Karolina’s or Nico’s weighed on her. Stacey had tucked Gert under her arm two nights before they left, tucking the small girl into place on the rooftop and, for the first time, beginning to point out the stars and the lines and the shapes and tell the stories behind each.

There was Orion, the warrior, who had fallen in love with one of the goddesses - the eternal maiden Artemis - and when her father and brother conspired to kill him, she placed him in the sky to keep watch over her. The Greek mythology had painted Andromeda as a damsel in distress, waiting, distraught, for the tale’s hero to save her from her chains, but Gert thought she was just as strong, if not stronger, than Perseus. After all, her constellation was far larger and brighter. The Little and Big Dippers floated on the edges of the sky, as if perfectly rotated against one another from the stars at the center of Orion’s belt.

And so Gert bounded into Alex’s guest house the next night, dragging her friends with as much force as a six-year-old could muster on to the grass. She flopped on to her back, patting the ground as an urging for the others to follow, and tried to recite all of the stories her mom had told her.

“Up there! That one, the really shiny one,” she squealed, finger pointing wildly at the sky, before tracing her hand in the black expanse above her head. “That’s Andro… Andromeda! She was a princess, and her parents tried to leave her out to be sea monster food, but a hero named Percy saved her!”

She remembers talking for what felt like hours, her voice gradually growing softer as the sky darkened, and the small, sharp pains fluttering in her chest when she realized that Molly had dozed off to her right with most of the others close behind. She paused, allowing the story to trail off into the balmy air, almost missing the quiet, reassuring glances of two pairs of eyes on hers.

Amy smiled, urging her to continue with the stories. And so she did, walking through the last segments of the sky above their heads: _Draco, Gemini, Hercules_. From across the circle, she could see a faraway look across Chase’s face, eyes flickering back and forth, a glance at her face, followed by seconds scanning the stars.

“And they always stay the same?” he asked, his voice shy, as if giving sound to the movement of looking up at her from underneath his eyelashes.

Gert nodded. “Yeah, that’s what my mom said. They move around as the seasons change, but they’re always there.”

“So if we look at them tomorrow, and you’re also looking at them from where you are, we’ll be looking at the same sky?” Even more shy, somehow.

“Yeah,” Gert whispered, her lips breaking into a smile. “Exactly.”

 

* * *

  
And now, if she peered out beneath her clear frames, squinting slightly at the horizon, it was second nature to trace the shapes above her. With every count of ten, she could all but see a thin, bright line traversing the corners of the navy expanse, uniting far-off stars in a dazzling array of patterns and stories. Orion’s Belt always jumped out at her first - three stars in a slight curve, always in the center of her frame of view. Some cultures, as Gert learned shortly after the night on the grass at the Wilder’s, viewed the Belt as the ultimate sisterhood: three triplet stars traveling in perfect lock-step, directing weary gazers to the other wonders of the night. Indeed, the three appeared as if a celestial compass, lighting the way to countless other images. Taurus to the right, Sirius at bottom left. The three maintained perfect distance from one another, individually identifiable, but together shining so much brighter.

In the nights since she’d learned the truth about Pride, about Stacey and Dale and the world she had grown up in, Gert had sought out the stars more and more frequently, clamoring into the basement to find her emotional support dinosaur before curling up on the wide expanse of the Yorkes’ backyard. It didn’t matter how awful each day felt, how everything she had ever known threatened to collapse on her shoulder - the moment she found the slight arc, she could breathe.

And so her eyes flickered over the center of the sky, tracing the curve of Orion’s Belt with every inhale, and reversing with each exhale.

One, two.

One, two.

One, tw—

“I’m sure she’s out there somewhere.”

A voice cut through the quiet, cleanly slicing through Gert’s silent reverie. Like a knee-jerk reaction she tears her eyes away from the navy expanse above and swivels left, reorienting her line of sight on the figure that has appeared behind her, breath catching slightly in her throat. To say she’s shocked to see a mussed head of brown hair is half an understatement and half an exaggeration. She wasn’t expecting Chase - or anyone, for that matter - to seek her out for a while, but it doesn’t surprise her that he’s the first to approach. She can almost picture the conversation at the campsite: a weary voice suggesting someone check on Gert, Molly, curled up on the ground against a log, instantly nudging Chase to do the honors.

“I’m sure she’s out there somewhere,” he repeats, softer this time, his eyes concerned, cautious, as he glances down at her.

She can tell from the way his face falls a second later that hers must have dropped in kind, regret mixed with some type of horror tinging his cheeks pink. In the moment his gaze meets hers, she knows that he knows: that she wasn’t actually thinking about the dinosaur-sized hole in her heart, that his question served to rip the bandage of a wound, letting the pain pour out of her, that the anxiety she’d managed to shove to bottom of her chest had started to bubble up, pumping _what ifs_  and worst-case scenarios through her bloodstream.

He gingerly drops down to the rock beside her, well-aware to avoid sudden movements, and as the side of his leg falls against hers, she realizes for the first time that he’s no longer wearing the ridiculous tan trench coat from the thrift shop, arms instead straining, ever so slightly, against the crisp white fabric of last night’s button down.

Suddenly, all she can picture is the image the two of them must make: side by side, close enough to be within each other’s orbit, but neither entirely at ease. Dressed head to toe in clothing from the night before, clothing that been quickly, carefully unbuttoned and undone, until the pieces lay in a heap at the edge of the Tannenbaum’s chuppah. The black slip he’d handed back to her in silent wonder, the white dress shirt she’d slid over bare arms, if only for a second, if only to see the hoods of his eyelids drop and the shaky breath of her name fall from his mouth in response.

She knows that if Molly were here, fifteen paces behind and ducking behind a tree, her little sister would be stifling laughter, amused - to no end - by the seeming idiocy of the two. And she’d be right. This, whatever _this_  is, is somehow so inconsequential in the grand scheme of their parents and Jonah and yet so much more important than any battle they’ve fought.

So Gert laughs. Except, tears still pricking the corners of her eyes, it sounds something strangled, something pained.

Chase’s head immediately turns to her, eyes searching for the source of pain. She shakes her head, almost imperceptibly, and changes tack, deciding that the Pandora’s box of what they are - or what they _aren’t_ after the fight she picked at the dig site - is better left for a night without emotional exhaustion, hunger, and a growing sense of dread.

“It’s weird, isn’t it,” she starts, looking down at the fingers fidgeting in her lap. “I didn’t even know Old Lace existed a few weeks ago, and now it feels like I… can’t live without her?” She ends her train of thought as a question, knowing that the a period - a full stop - is more than she can handle at the moment. Because all the walls that Chase Stein had managed to crash through had been rebuilt as quick as a lightning strike, cement and metal bars hardening in place when she called it a one time thing and he didn’t fight her back. The last thing she needed was to let down the carefully constructed walls again, to cry in front of him.

Before she can blink, or fulfill her anxious tick of tucking and re-tucking a stray purple lock behind her ear, Chase’s arm wraps around her back and gently tugs her toward him. The movement pulls them just a fraction closer, but Gert can feel the line of warmth stretching diagonally from her left shoulder begin to envelop her, bracing her against the unknown. His hand brushes her waist and she swears she can feel the pulse of his heartbeat in his fingertips through her jacket and dress, goosebumps clashing against the warm Los Angeles sky.

“Tell me,” he says, voice soft again, and Gert immediately fears that he’s going to make her talk through her dinosaur’s absence. If Chase notices the way her body tenses, freezes up, he gives no indication, continuing to draw lazy circles at the base of her ribs. “What’s the story behind that big, bright star? That’s the hunter, right?”

And as simply as that, he tosses the ball into her court. _Your move, he blinks._ It’s different than last night - neither a collective resignation to the fragile thing floating between them nor a hastily decided attempt at self-preservation. It’s something softer, tentative even.

So she runs with it.

She leans back ever so slightly into his weight, pointing and directing his line of sight. She starts with Orion, recounting the mythology that’s second nature to her, and begins to move clockwise across the sky. _Ursa Major and Minor, Taurus, Cassiopeia._

_Perseus._

_Virgo._

 

* * *

 

  
There's something startling familiar about this conversation, about walking Chase through the constellations that have always enraptured her heart - and suddenly, they’re fourteen again, pencils and notebooks scattered across the Stein’s roof.

Gert’s palms sting red as she wipes them on her jeans, glancing back in time to see Chase peek his head over the ledge before hoisting himself up, over, down, landing with a _thud_ on the deck. He cracks a joke about her fear of heights and she bristles, for show, and wonders if he’ll take her flushed cheeks as a sign of ladder-induced exertion (and not recognize them as a direct consequence of the smirk he shot her as he jimmied the lock open, ushering her up the vertical rungs.

She turns, slowly, taking the roof in. The Stein’s roof is even bigger than hers - a wide, square platform hidden from outside view by the fanciful turrets that run along the house’s edges, completely open to the night sky around them save for a small, protective railing. It was an area of the house Gert never even knew existed, more familiar, instead, with the carefully sanctioned corners where the kids were allowed to hang out or play: Chase’s room, the back yard, the kitchen. In one corner stands Janet Stein’s telescope; a remnant, Chase tells her, from his mom’s astrophysics research and Gert suddenly develops an entire reservoir of respect for the quietest parent of the group.

Chase flops on the ground, beckoning Gert to join him. The two fit comfortably with room to spare, even stretching out on their stomachs with notebooks in front of them, and Gert’s sure they could squeeze all seven of them up there if they really wanted (whether she wants to, well, that’s another story).

Truth be told, they shouldn’t be partners for this assignment.

Ms. Jones usually splits the class into pairs alphabetically, which would put with Gert with Alex had the latter not jumped ahead to the super advanced programming class, leaving his other eighth grade friends back in Atlas’s standard science course. So Gert works with Felicia Yang, a small, sweet girl who’s lived down the street from Nico her entire life; she’s quiet, but she always finishes her section of the lab report on time, so Gert can’t complain. Stein, by contrast, is partnered with Brandon Stone, a new student at Atlas who only really pays attention for the lessons that involve examples from sports.

But this time, Ms. Jones forgot to hand out the assignment until the class’s weekly lab time, frantically darting up and down the rows of beakers handing out instructions.

Gert pulled the giant plastic goggles off her glasses and onto the crown of her head, carefully navigating around her lab-mandated braid (hair off the face, tucked away neatly read the poster at the door) as she scribbled down the last few measurements. She could see Ms. Jones making her way across the room, glancing around to see which, if any of the partners were out of the ordinary.

_Karolina and Ryan_

_Nico and Brittany_

_Kyle and John_

Just like alwa—

“Can I borrow a pencil?”

“What?” Gert hissed, almost knocking over the day’s experiment as she turned her head to the side, Chase Stein ten feet in front of his assigned lab table, instead perched at the corner of hers.

“Can I borrow a pencil? You know, the thing you write with?” There was something mischievous in his voice, mirrored in the slightly raised eyebrow.

“I know what a pencil is, but we’re almost done with lab how have you not had one this—“

“Ah, Gert, Chase, here’s your assignment, due next Tuesday,” Ms. Jones interrupted, dropping two carefully stapled packets onto the table surface in front of Gert and turning to the next group, all before Gert could get a word in edgewise.

She gaped at the boy to her left, noticing, in the corner of the room, Eiffel fuming from her station adjacent to Chase’s.

“So partner,” he drawls, bypassing a laugh to tug on the long, brown braid that rests on her shoulder, “we can head up to the roof after dinner with the others?”

“Fine,” Gert rolls her eyes, only half-annoyed at not having the reliability of Felicia to boost her grade, and not registering the way Chase saunters back to his desk, pencil not in hand, “but I am _not_  doing this entire assignment for us.”

Which is precisely how Gert ended up doing the entire assignment for the two of them.

Chase had looked helpful at first, pulling a copy of their textbook from his bag, as well as their assignment, but once he had actually read the assignment through - and seen the long list of objects they’d have to find, identify, and define in the sky above - he’d retreated to the corner opposite the telescope. So yes, he’d been useful in providing his mom’s high-tech telescope and ample space for star gazing, but hadn’t done anything since that didn’t involve the intermittent buzzing of his cell phone or the doodles in the margins of his notebook.

Gert glanced down from the viewfinder, jotting down a few notes onto the worksheet, before readjusting her view across the sky.

“Chase,” she chastises, “you’ve gotta help out with some of this.”

Silence.

“Chase…” she tries, turning her head across the roof. He’s exactly where he’s been for the past hour: folded up against the ledge, notebook and pen perched to the side of his lanky frame, the white light of his phone illuminating his face from below.

She lets out a slow breath, resetting the telescope once more. It was fine, she rationalized, her class average was high enough with Felicia’s help that she could handle one less-than-stellar assignment, and it’s not like she’d ever have to partner up with Chase again. Though, why would Chase try to make them partners only to ignore her the minute they got started?

She glances out of the corner of her eye once more. It’s like his face is frozen mid-laugh, a smirk pulling at the corners of his mouth and eyes lit up in amusement. And it hits Gert like a brick wall.

Because Gert is the _reliable_  one. Because he can count on Gert to get the assignment done if not perfectly, with a high enough grade to appease his father, while he needs to exert no effort whatsoever.

She feels a flash of heat run through her - some mixture of anger and embarrassment - because she knows it’s beautiful, picture-perfect Eiffel on the other side of Chase’s phone, all hair flips and mascara and everything teenage boys’ dreams are made of. She’s sure the two are sharing jokes, all lighthearted and flirtatious and oblivious to anything else going on around them.

Including the dark-haired girl with tortoiseshell glasses.

She can’t decide if her anger comes from being ignored or because she’s found herself into the most clichéd, anti-feminist trope possible. No, she’s not in love with her best friend and she’s not seething with jealousy at his textcapades, but she can’t deny that there’s something about this all that stings, an ache pulsing at the bottom of her heart.

So Gert settles on Chase wanting an easy “A,” him choosing her as the most convenient route to placate his father. And so she pushes the dull pain to the back of her mind, wishing, only briefly, to be seen as more than the smart one.

_(What Gert doesn’t know, and will likely never find out, is how absolutely wrong she is. Because Chase Stein didn’t carefully distract Ms. Jones with an experiment-gone-wrong for most of the lab period to have an easier time with the assignment; no, he had grown up listening to Gert’s reverence for the stars, watching her face soften and her eyes go in and out of focus - like they were looking into another universe - as she’d talk through the stars and the shapes, and he figured this was his chance to learn one-on-one without showing his hand._

_But by the time they’d reached the roof, he was too wrapped up in the facade of playing it cool and too nervous to tell her he’d seen her - he’d always seen her, heard her, noticed her and how she transformed when talking about the stars - that he froze, a defense mechanism honed as Victor Stein’s son, and retreated to a world that was easier, if more shallow._

_He watched her eyes flicker over to him every few minutes as he sketched, ancient Greek myths and creatures coming to life on the page before him, and he wondered what would happen if she turned her seeing-through-universes gaze on him. Could she see the sudden nervousness building in his heart, the pure reverence for her ability to weave knowledge into breathtaking stories, the growing inadequacies he felt the longer he stood next to her?_

_It was quite similar to the way, years later, she’d spot his backpack bobbing around Atlas - inky black swirled in bursts of bright blue, a night sky full of constellations that he would carry close to him - and wonder if he saw and learned more those nights than he’d let on.)_

 

* * *

 

Seated side-by-side on the rock, Chase’s usual six-inch height advantage fell significantly. So much so that if he would lean down just lightly, an inch at most, he can meet her line of sight directly, and Gert’s suddenly struck aware of how close the two are sitting, voice trailing off as she wraps up the myth of the Pleiades. In the moonlight, beating down light and hazy into the clearing, she can make out a host of freckles dotting his face, seeing - for the second time in as many days - the marks so small, so light, that they’re only perceptible in such proximity.

Without thinking, Gert reaches her right hand up, wordlessly tracing three of the freckles that run from middle of his cheek to the corner of his mouth in a perfect, slight arc. A mirror image of her favorite constellation.

She blinks up at him, slow and steady and searching, as he moved his left hand up to rest over hers and the air between them feels drenched in uncertainty, nervousness crackling like lightning. He looks at her as if he’s staring straight through her, eyes attempting to re-read last night between the lines. _One time thing? they ask her, nearly certain of the bluff and self-preservation - nearly._  His head dips a fraction of an inch closer to hers, looking up at her underneath impossibly long eyelashes, nudging the control to her side of the rock. She can feel emotion and energy starting to cloud her vision, mixing memories as innocent as childhood friendship with some decidedly less so, until every inch of her skin is buzzing with how alive she feels around him.

She’s just about to do it - to be brave, to go after what she wants (and god, does she want it), to close the space between them and swallow back all of the insecurities that burst out last night - but she’s plucked from the moment so quickly it’s like a rubber band snapped and she’s suddenly hurtling back to Earth. From behind, there’s a loud, crackling hiss. Someone - Nico or Karolina, they’re sure - must have doused the campfire in water, smothering the remaining embers and accidentally shattering the moment in turn.

There’s an awkward urgency as the fog of the moment dissipates, a shifting of limbs back across their respective halves of the rock. Her instinct in the quiet shuffle is to fidget away, to use the physical space to build back up the protective walls around her heart, but his arm stays wrapped around her back, holding her not quiet close, but preventing her from retreating all the same.

Chase clears his throat, keeping his voice still, quiet, in reflection of the night.

“I’m sorry, you know, for voting with the others.” He turns his head toward her again, sheepish. “I know how much she meant to you, I just… I couldn’t bear it if something happened.”

The dinosaur-sized hole lodges itself back into the Gert’s chest, pushing the typical rhythmic pulses of her heartbeat into a stutter, and she curls a little closer into him.

But before they have to go through the entire process again - the calming and the breathing and the storytelling - two shadows appear over theirs.

“Hey guys,” Nico steps forward, Karolina waiting shyly, a little smugly, at the edge of the trees as two heads snap toward their direction, blushes rising on both. “Molly passed out about an hour ago, and we just got her set up for the night in The Gib. We’re going to scan the perimeter once more for Alex, and maybe scrounge up some more firewood.”

“Do you need any help?” Chase asks, and Gert can’t decide which of the two possible answers she’s more afraid of. A yes firmly ends the moment, leaving - like the dance before it - another swath of unanswered questions and uncertain interactions. But a no is almost even scarier, with the potential of so many conversations that need to be had, and answers, thoughts, feelings that could make or break them each.

Nico glances back at Karolina, smirking slightly at the blonde’s reaction. “Nah,” she drawls, “I think we’re good. We’ll be back in a bit.” The two disappeared into the thicket of the woods as quickly as they had come, and from the corner of her eye Gert sees Chase shake his head softly.

“What?” she cocks an eyebrow up at him.

“You gotta admit, the two of them are many things, but subtle isn’t one of them.”

Gert stares, because _there it is_. The first acknowledgment that anything has happened since anything happened (or, to be fair, since she self-destructed). And she’s not quite sure which thing that happened he’s referring to - what they did or the way they stumbled upon Karolina and Nico in the hallways, two extra pairs of guilty eyes flickering sheepishly to the ground, or frankly _both_  - but there’s something so light, so freeing about him releasing the thought into the open air, letting it flicker and flutter through the space between them. It’s no longer just a weight on her shoulders, but something for them both to address and figure out, and that revelation breathes air into each of Gert’s limbs until it feels like she’s floating.

So she laughs. Quietly at first, but growing louder and clearer until she catches Chase’s eye, and he joins in.

“You know,” she says, wiping a stray tear from her eye as her breathing calms down, “everything about this is just _so_  ridiculous.”

“Yeah,” he nods, “it definitely is.”

His smirk is back as he pulls her in a little bit closer, bringing them into a middle ground of contact between their near-kiss and the awkward attempts at space. “Come on.” He jostles her shoulder slightly, rising to his feet and she follows instinctively. “Let’s go check on Sleeping Beauty.”

 

* * *

 

The walk back to the Gib, as they’ve taken to calling the van, is both the easiest and the scariest thing Gert’s done in as long as she can remember. There’s something oddly familiar about being tucked under Chase’s arm, but she can see the open expanse of the night before them - the possibilities and potentials too numerous to count and so many ways in which the night can turn.

It’s oddly familiar, but tinged with a weight of nervousness that never existed when they were ten and running wild. Even without the nonsense of their parents and Pride, life was so much simpler then: no love triangles, no high school hierarchies, just the seven of them, together, whole. It was Chase, above all the others, who had indulged her in every adventure her young head decided they should take, Chase who had gifted her almost all of her most treasured books for birthdays and holidays, Chase who had been her person, her confidant, her best friend for more than a decade. There was no spectrum, no in between, he had been her everything.

The years since Amy’s death had hardened Gert. Sure, they had all attempted to escape reality in their own ways, each drawing further within themselves until they were entrenched in a host of high school stereotypes, but it was the loss of Chase that stung the most, even years after the fact. It was a break that happened gradually, then all at once, but quickly enough that Gert never saw it coming.

Gone were the bright eyes, the peels of infectious laughter, the endless whispers across the telephone and into the night. Instead, she watched a physical wall envelop him - teammates and cheerleaders and groupies and wannabes creating a thick, solid barrier between him and his former life.

Some nights, she couldn’t blame him. It was only a matter of time, really, before he got whisked into the world of state championships and mini-skirted groupies. That was what happened when you had a best friend who was not only brilliant but attractive and athletic and easy going - Chase was always destined to fall in with the upper echelons of Atlas, the only variable was when.

She’d viewed Chase on a binary since, a clear before and after, her friend and someone she used to know. The weeks since that night at Alex’s house had served to chip away at the bitterness, slowly easing the two back into one another’s orbit. She wanted, more than anything, to keep some semblance of the lines drawn between them, to not fall back into the easy lull of childhood companionship that built them - but her heart, her stupid heart, was so damn happy to have him and his quirky mind and his soft smiles back by her side that, well, most of that went out the window.

It was as easy as breathing, to walk alongside him and mindlessly talk. There was no urgency to catch up, to fill each other in on two years that they had only glimpsed bits and pieces of from afar. No, in a way, it was as if they’d never stopped talking - complaining about homework and questioning the rest of the world as if they were two, normal high school juniors.

Chase slides the door of the Gib open, clamoring into the van before extending his hand to Gert. She glances swiftly, between his face and his hand and back, before deciding to ignore both and hopping up onto the door’s ledge. Rather than look offended, he smiles, shaking his head softly as if he should’ve known better.

From her perch at the doorway, she can see Molly curled up in the very back of the van, somehow looking even smaller than her fourteen years. It’s kind of insane, Gert thinks, how quickly she forgets how young Molly really is. The rest of them are old - well, old enough - to deal with the bullshit of their parents and everything else collapsing at their feet, but Molly’s… just a kid.

“It’s crazy,” he breathes, “how her superpower makes her feel like she has to bear the burden of all of this. She’s so young.”

Gert glares sideways and Chase, caught, sheepishly rubs his the back of his head with right hand. “It’s not my fault you were thinking out loud,” he teases, lopsided grin breaking out over his face.

She turns back to scanning the interior of the van. Karolina and Nico had done _well_ , stuffing shirts into sheets to create six makeshift pillows, ripping seams apart in thrift store dresses for extra blankets, and somehow finding two sleeping bags - each fully opened and lain across the floor in place of four beds. A glance to the right showed they’d done something similar with the van’s front seats, leaning the passenger side back far enough for Alex to crash there when he returned.

Gert wasn’t sure if it was the complete and utter exhaustion taking over, but it looked kind of… homey. The further she crawled into the van, the heavier her eyelids and limbs felt.

“Okay,” she said, flopping down onto the half of the sleeping back immediately next to Molly, “bed time?”

Silence.

“Chase?” She sat up, miffed at the extra exertion of energy. “This isn’t a lame come on, I’m so damn tired, can we please just— what?”

She paused, noticing the bright red blush staining his cheeks, his entire body coiled tense, as if he were afraid - petrified - of upsetting the comfortable balance they’d finally reached.

“Uh, Gert, look around again.”

She shot him a confused look, but flipped over until she was sitting on her knees to scan the inside of the Gib once more. Molly nestled in a corner near the backdoors to the left, Alex’s backpack on the driver seat. Nico’s flimsy disguise dropped on the far right side of the right sleeping bag, with Karolina’s white church rescue clothes on the left. She held down the left half of the second sleeping bag, which left….

“Oh.”

 

* * *

 

Gert shifted again, staring up at the darkening roof of the Gib and trying to get comfortable. As nice as it was to have a sleeping bag separating her from the hard floor of the van’s floor, it was too thin to provide any sort of real comfort. The cold had started to set in for the night, the dipping temperature that seemed manageable by the fireplace and the rock now making every hair on her arms stand up, brushing goosebumps up and down her skin. She was contorted into a half-curve, most of her body parallel to Molly, but her head and chest tilted toward the middle of the van. It wasn’t uncomfortable - yet - but she was sure she’d have a massive crick in her neck by morning.

So this is roughing it, Gert thought. Noted.

She was being only a little dramatic, like the way Molly would always stomp her heels _just_  loudly enough to irritate Dale when she didn’t get her way in the house. As far as “roughing it” went, and she was sure it would get a lot worse, it seemed pretty, well, manageable.

Sure, they were squished into an ice box, and Alex was still MIA, and their parents were still evil, but she had Molly.

And, of course, a pair of up-to-no-good meddling friends.

At some point, in furnishing The Gib for six teens to sleep in, someone had draped Chase’s truly awful trench coat across the spaces clearly marked for Gert and Karolina. It was fitting, she thought bitterly, even if she couldn’t justify directing any anger at the beautiful blonde. The mess between her and Chase - if you could even be as nice as to call it a mess - was her fault alone; a product of heightened anxiety and jumbles of nerves and a quite obnoxious voice in her head that wouldn’t cease to remind her that it was only the craziness that had become their lives holding them together.

He had been kind enough in sorting out the beds, looking appropriately sheepish as realization dawned over Gert’s face and silently setting out to reorganize Nico and Karolina’s work before she could explode. She waved his effort away with a hand, mumbling something about Nico thinking she can play God and being too tired to do anything except lie down. His response was a whispered “Are you sure?” before sifting through the small pile of thrift store clothes tucked in a corner near the door, handing her a stretched out dark green tee and a pair of grey sweatpants (leaving, she registers in the back of her mind, the slimmer pickings of the hand-me-downs for himself, the girls, and Alex).

“I can… uh…” he whispered as Gert shrugged out of her denim jacket, and she managed to whip her head around in time to catch his eyes for a second, before he ducked his head into the van’s shadows, gesturing toward the door. In the pale light, she could see the blush tinging his cheeks red, the words lost but the intention noted.

She should say yes, or, hell, even nod quickly - confirm his noble impulse and save them both the awkwardness and trouble. Her worst fear, she realizes, is irrational but oh, so plausible: getting stuck in the dress, needing his help to finish changing, and being brutally reminded of all the things that she cannot have. So the choice is clear, and she should say no. But she’s not used to seeing this Chase - the one who’s pliable and soft, constantly looking back at her for not reassurance but acknowledgment, the one dancing as delicately around her words as she feels around him.

She waved his half-spoken question away, once more, and turning back to her little corner, focusing on every breath on steeling her shaking hands and slipping into the makeshift pajamas as fast as possible. She fiddled with the ties on the dress, as if to fold it up nicely, until she heard the rustling on the other side of the van stop. Before she can turn around, she can _feel_  him in the space next to her, warmth radiating off of him into the cool night air.

Which is how she ended up here, cold and restless and desperately trying limit her movements so she doesn’t wake Molly. She could feel the night creeping later and later, but it was like every nerve ending in her body was hyper aware of their proximity, her mind whirring to bridge the gap between last night and now.

She lets out a slow breath, the slight chatter of her teeth the only sound in the van. She can feel, rather than see, Chase shift immediately, sliding a fraction of an inch closer to her and running a hand through already sleep-mussed hair. His eyes flick over her for a second, at the flimsy sleeping bag she’s curled up on and the small blanket she’s tucked around Molly, before he shoots straight up.

“You’re freezing,” he whisper-admonishes, reaching to the other side of the van and rummaging around.

She wants to argue, to shake off his concern and go back to her sleeplessness in silence, but there’s a look in his eyes when he turns back to her, beige trench coat in hand, and every urge to refuse dissipates. Gert nods, her voice feeling small and swallowed up as he shuffles and reshuffles them. “I… yeah, thank you.”

He pulls their makeshift pillows closer, nearly touching, and delicately cloaks Gert in the trench coat.

“It’s not super warm, but it should keep you a bit more insulated, especially if its layered over those sweatpants,” he starts, lying back down but, this time, on the edge of Gert’s space.

There’s a wave of nostalgia, sweet and stinging, as she remembers how younger Chase used to ramble when he was nervous. Even now, she can feel it radiating off of him, mixing with shared body heat. (She wonders, in the back of her mind, as sleep pulls her under, if he can feel the nerves rolling off her skin, too).

 

* * *

 

 

She’s not quite sure how much time has passed - though, judging from the fuzzy shapes of Nico and Karolina in the corner, it must be a lot later. Nor is she sure who started it. Chase is all but underneath her, her head perched in the crook between his shoulder and neck, one pair of their arms tangled and the other with hands gently clasped.

Every synapse in her brain wants to fire off in alert - danger, caution, for god’s sake Gert be careful - stoked by the proximity and the intimacy and all of the things that shouldn’t be happening after the days (and nights) they’ve had. She knows it’s probably an awful decision, that a moment like this, hazed in sleep and just unguarded enough, is an opening to a direct path to shatter her heart. But to have him near her, fingers inching toward hers and pointer stroking the side of her thumb, it’s like all of that disappears in an instant. And as much as she wants to hate him for having this effect on her - for simultaneously putting her at ease and making her heart thud in her chest after all of these years - there’s something about being curled in close to him that makes her feel, well, like she’s come home.

He stirs next to her, only slightly, and she freezes as he turns toward her, a second too late to pretend to be asleep. His eyes are clouded with sleep, but they crinkle up at the sides as he catches her gaze.

She catches a quick glimpse of his smile before he dips his head toward hers, gently pressing his lips to her forehead, a whispered “G’night, Gert,” breathless into the night air. He nestles his head back toward hers, scooting half an inch closer into her left side. Her heart stops, and then bursts, the odd sensation of being both grounded and weightless flooding her limbs.

For the first time in too many years, she can’t hear the anxiety pulsing in the back of her head. All she can feel is warmth radiating into her side, the light touches on her hands and arms, the gentle exhalation of breath tickling the side of her neck. She doesn’t even need to squint against the blackness, she’s close enough that she can see the three small dots arcing across his cheek. Her own Orion’s Belt, shining into the night sky.

The world will be quick to shatter the little peace they’ve built, she’s sure. Tomorrow will come and all of the problems and their parents and the fact that they’re on the run and wanted by the police will come crashing back into them, into her. But for right now, she’s safe - tucked in between a motley crew of friends she never expected to have again, curled up alongside a boy who’s had her heart since she was eight years old.

She squeezes his hand slightly, a soft smile breaking over her lips as his subconscious pulses her hand back. They have time, or they’ll figure out some way to find it. But that’s for a later Gert to worry about. For now, it’s enough to close her eyes and breathe him in, to have his hand in hers and hers in his. For now, it’s enough to hold on and not let go.


End file.
